Contact Solutions, a provider of on-demand contact automation solutions, including interactive voice response, email/text messaging, and Web transactions for business and government, today announced a new initiative to improve and manage customer experience (CX) and customer satisfaction levels in its hosted IVR solutions.

A major enhancement to the company's Continuous Improvement Practice (CIP), the new CX initiative allows Contact Solutions to benchmark, measure, and analyze CX in conjunction with IVR performance and automation rates. The new CX initiative includes a comprehensive rating process based on actual caller experiences to score and report an IVR system's CX performance. This rating system uses both surveys and analytical information to measure whether the caller believes the experience was useful, easy to use, and enjoyable while trying to achieve a goal. Contact Solutions uses this information to identify actions that will improve the IVR experience and increase the level of satisfaction for callers.

According to Paul Logan, Contact Solutions CEO, "American businesses lose more than $80 billion a year due to poor customer service. That loss creates a huge opportunity for improvement we can address because the IVR is such a high-visibility, high-volume point of customer interaction for most enterprises. This groundbreaking CX initiative makes Contact Solutions the first vendor to provide such a powerful tool for enterprises to recover some of that $80 billion of lost value by serving their customers better in the IVR."

"Enterprises have long used surveys to gather customer feedback. Surveys can do a good job of capturing customer perceptions, but surveys alone can't match a caller's perception with the details of what that caller actually experienced in the IVR," said Justin Lemrow, director of continuous improvement at Contact Solutions. :Without that direct link between perception and reality, enterprises had to rely on intuition and educated guesses to decide how to optimize performance of their IVR systems. Contact Solutions has solved that problem. Our CX initiative brings science to the art of customer experience management so our clients can make better business decisions."

Ashwin Iyer, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, says "Enterprises struggle to benchmark and improve customer experience in the contact center, and don't always get the results they want when they take action. With this new capability from Contact Solutions, executives will be able to accurately benchmark their IVR performance against similar applications across the industry. Once they know where they stand, they will have the data and analytics to guide and support decisions that affect customer experience and business results. This capability will be particularly valuable to executives in industries that experience high levels of customer churn, such as banking and service providers."